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Monday, November 18, 2013

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“HANNS AND RUDOLF – The German Jew and the Hunt for the
Kommandant of Auschwitz” by Thomas Harding
(Random House – William Heinemann, $NZ37: 99)

Hanns was
Hanns Alexander, German-born Jew, refugee from Hitler, officer in the British
Army. Rudolf was Rudolf Hoss, Kommandant of Auschwitz, the man most directly
responsible for the murder of about one-and-a-half million human beings. After
the British liberated Belsen, they set about bringing to book those important
Nazi war criminals whom they could find in that northern part of Germany that
they were occupying. Hanns was assigned to the unit hunting the biggest offenders.
He had to give up on tracking down one, as the leads went cold. He was
determined not to give up on his second case. Diligently following every clue,
he managed to locate the isolated barn where Hoss had hidden since the war’s
end. With a hand-picked unit, he took the man in.

Hoss was tried three times –
first by the British at Belsen. Then by the international war crimes court led
by the Americans in Nuremburg. Finally by the Poles in Warsaw. The Poles hanged
him in 1947.

To the prosecution, the value of
Hoss was that he was willing to confess all his crimes matter-of-factly. This
was at a time when other leading Nazi criminals were still claiming not to have
known about the attempted genocide. After Hoss wrote, in prison, his “autobiography”,
parts of which were read aloud by the prosecution in court, some of the other defendants
changed their stories and admitted that they did know what the death camps were
about. They now tried to plead that either they were “only obeying orders”, or
that their superiors were really responsible for what was happening.

The author of Hanns and Rudolf, Thomas Harding, is
Hanns Alexander’s great-nephew (his grandmother was Hanns’ sister) and he is
proud of his great-uncle. He writes his story as a double biography of the war
criminal and the man who captured him. Inevitably, though, it is Hoss who
dominates the story

What strikes you most about Hoss
is his dogged unimaginativeness – his complete inability to see anything more
important than currying favour with his boss Heinrich Himmler or with other
powerful Nazi officials.

From the earliest age, he dived
into extreme nationalism, readily abandoning the Catholicism in which he had
been raised to serve the Reich. He was officially too young to serve in the
First World War, but he lied about his age and served anyway with reasonable
distinction. Because he was part of the German forces that were trying to prop
up the Turkish Empire, he was in the Middle East when the war ended in 1918 –
but typically he was one of the soldiers who avoided surrender by making their
way in haste back to Germany. The Reich came first.

In the turmoil that following the
collapse of the German Empire, he joined other extreme nationalists in the
Freikorps, fighting the Poles in East Prussia and harassing Social Democrats in
Germany. And when the Weimar Republic seemed to stabilise and extreme
nationalists lost favour, he retreated into the Blut-und-Boden back-to-the-land Artamanen League, labouring as a
farmer, marrying, raising a family. Like his comrade Martin Bormann, he had
already joined the Nazi Party when it was just a small bunch of Bavarian
cranks. Therefore, when Hitler came to power – and in spite of his lack of real
achievement – Hoss was in a position to be regarded as an “Old Fighter” and to
gain favour.

So to his career as a
concentration camp commandant, first learning his trade at Dachau under the
likes of Theodore Eicke, then moving on to greater responsibilities at
Sachsenhausen, until Himmler put him in charge of a small camp in an obscure
village in occupied Poland called Oswiecim – Auschwitz in German.
Punctiliously, at Himmler’s request, Hoss expanded Auschwitz into a massive
multi-site facility.

How messy mass-killings were by
machine-gun or exhaust fumes! Hoss came up with the ingenious solution of
gassing prisoners with canisters of granulated Zyklon B. He was also ingenious
in arranging Lagerorchester –
orchestras made up of prisoners whose soothing music would prevent people from
getting too fearful or upset as they were marched to “showers”. (It had been so
annoying when, on one occasion, a group of prisoners panicked and started
fighting back.) And once the practicalities of mass-murder were worked out, and
once Hoss had received a pat on the head from Himmler and other Nazi bigwigs,
he had no further qualms about what he was doing. His only worry was that
Himmler might change his mind and think he wasn’t doing his job efficiently
enough.

Thomas Harding is fully aware
that his chief source for Hoss’s feelings and reactions is the “autobiography”
Hoss wrote when he was finally under arrest. Harding therefore knows that there
could be streams of self-deception and self-justification in Hoss’s account of
himself. Even so, his account rings true. Early in the Nazi regime, when he was
working at Dachau, Hoss was genuinely upset by the cruelty and crass violence
of the Nazi guards in their treatment of prisoners. What he wanted was a
smooth, orderly, efficient means of murdering thousands of people, without the
upsetting screams and blood. This was what he created at Auschwitz. It was so
smooth and orderly that Hoss’s family, living in the villa attached to the
death camp, could blithely ignore what was going on over their back garden
wall. His children grew up remembering Auschwitz as a place of back-garden
picnics, games and canoeing on the nearby river, only occasionally marred by an
unpleasant smell.

Harding’s particular skill is his
totally dispassionate style. He does not dwell on the methods of murder, the
scale of the operation, the suffering, accounts of survivors or accounts of
individuals who perished. He knows that readers will already be aware of these
things. Instead, he focuses on this unimaginative, morally-dead technocrat and
lets us judge how monstrous his actions were. It is more shocking to read of
the quiet, fond papa routinely going off to this work each day than it would be
if he were depicted as an eager sadist.

Of course I am tempted to use Hannah
Arendt’s famous phrase about the “banality of evil” – or I would be if I had
not heard [via Youtube] Dr Yaacov Lozowick, former director of Yad Vashem,
object to the term and point out, correctly, that those who ran death camps
were not mere order-signing bureaucrats, but were fully aware of what they were
doing. Yet there still seems something to Hannah Arendt’s phrase. This man Hoss
was totally undistinguished in appearance and bearing. There was nothing
perversely glamorous about him. He was a human zero who murdered masses of
people.

It occurs to me that in this
notice, I have neglected to say much about the book’s “hero”. Hanns Alexander
and his twin bother Paul appear to have been a pair of cheerful rascals, often
pulling practical jokes, sometimes telling smutty stories and very positive in
temperament. Thomas Harding does not make them out to be saints. Hanns and Rudolf gives a full account of
Hanns’ life as the son of a prosperous Berlin Jewish family, escape to Britain,
eagerness both to fight and to gain British citizenship, and post D-Day
military career. At first Hanns was assigned to the pioneer corps (clearing
roads, building bridges etc. for the advancing British army). As a detective
hunting down Rudolf Hoss, Hanns was strictly an amateur, as he had no police
training. But he was extraordinarily clever and dogged at following clues.

There is one moment in the book
where you find yourself totally on his side, even when he was doing something
slightly dodgy. When Hanns set out to arrest Hoss, he took a group which
contained some British soldiers who were, like him, Jews. They already knew
what Auschwitz was and who Hoss was. Hanns knew that he had to get Hoss back to
prison alive, so that he could testify in court. But at the point of arrest he
told his men “In ten minutes I want Hoss
in my car – undamaged”. Then he turned his back and walked away. Of course
the men beat the crap out of Hoss, as Hanns knew they would

In the circumstances, it is hard
to see how they would have wanted to do anything else.